‘I get better sleep’: the people who quit social media | Hacker News Reader

‘I get better sleep’: the people who quit social media

theguardian.com

57 pointsDLay35 comments

Social media use is a symptom of a bigger problem. That through automation and specialization we have run out of productive attention-occupying things to do.

Running a small business requires lots of decision-making and attention. Being a corporate drone is mind-numbing and does not. And it turns out, people have an inherent need to keep their attention busy with something. So when productive things run out, they fill their attention span with garbage.

That also means that quitting social media is only one half of the solution. The other half is to find a productive activity to take its place. And if you look deeper, you might notice that the current corporate hegemony is only sustainable when most of people's attention is drawn away from things that would create value for them.

It also depends on activity. Most people cannot focus on programming more than 20-30 hours per week. At the same time, all of the chores have became so efficient that they don't take up that much time. Granted, you also need to devote time to some physical activity, but that still leaves you plenty of time left. So, what do you do with it? If you have small children, they can occupy pretty much any amount of time, but otherwise, what is there to do but refresh Hacker News or rewatch old shows?

I feel that people in the earlier days worked much longer but not as intensely as coders (who basically are always facing new problems and can never go on autopilot), so they were able to fill out their days with productive activities better than us.

> what is there to do but refresh Hacker News or rewatch old shows

This statement boggles my mind. There are so many interesting things in this modern era to do, watch, learn, listen to, participate in that it would take 10 lifetimes just to scratch the surface.

I've had to make brutal cuts to my hobbies in recent years just so I could focus on deep diving into a few and I'm still desperately short on time.

It's not that there's nothing interesting to do, it's that there's a lack of interesting things to do that I am capable of doing in that frame of mind.

To use a physical example, there are loads of different strenuous activities to do, but I have a limited amount of physical energy in the day. Rock-climbing, hiking, skiing, and weight-lifting are all fun, but if I tried to do all of them in one day, especially consistently, I would cause myself serious injury.

It's similar with mental energy. I have a limited amount of mental focus in a day. Beyond that, further attempts to read scholarly articles, play around with code, or do whatever other academic hobby don't actually teach me anything, they simply delay my mind's ability to recover so I can be useful at work the next day.

Now, if I didn't have a job, I could work on mental activities until I had used all of my mental energy and then go do something physical. With a job, though, I'm expected to be at a desk and responding to people for ~40 hours a week. If I only have the mental energy for, say, 35 hours, there's a certain amount of time where I have to be sitting still but don't have the mental energy to do anything. Yes, I still have 10 lifetimes worth of things I want to do, but I can't work on them any faster with that extra time, I can literally only do something mindless.

Yes, exactly this. However, I remember that when I started working in 2003, I could focus for most of the work day, endure shitty commute and still play Civiliation in the evening or study for my Masters. Now it's out of question. Two things have changed: I'm older and I had to endure 17 years of laboring (whereas in 2003 I was young and yet unspent) and also Internet got vastly better and more addicting. I wonder which of those had more of an effect on me.

Work on your sleep routine. 8 hours of sleep a day should be your top priority. Even if it means a pay cut. If you can't fall asleep, do more exercise during the day and read something relaxing before bed (Sci-Fi works well for me). You will notice positive changes n a couple of months.

I sleep very well already, 8-9 hours per day.

I ditched Twitter about 3 months ago but now find myself missing the regular contact I had with some of my followers. Unfortunely, even utilizing Twitter's tools to manage the content of my feed (muted words, retweets off) my feed is still too "schizophrenic".

I've moved away from a "one feed" model of social media. I might still visit Twitter, or read someone's tweets but I'm not looking to have them "pushed" to me in one large messy feed.

Humor, News, Hobbies, Friends etc. are now all siloed to allow me to engage with them based on my mood & needs.

IMHO, "the feed" is the problem.

A way that I handle this, particularly on Twitter, is I have a couple people that I think do a good job of curating other people's content and retweeting it.

So I just go directly to their page, and I check in often enough that I know when I'm to things I have already seen.

I've fallen into the scrolling pages and pages on YouTube, and it is far less satisfying than when I used to just binge watch channels as I learned about them.

> IMHO, "the feed" is the problem.

Similarly, I unfollowed everyone on Facebook. I can still read someone's posts, but I don't want tons of content pushed at me automatically.

Couldn't agree more re "the feed". I ditched social media, then found myself back there every now and again to check in on friends - very hard not to get sucked back into "the feed" each time.

Eventually, I signed off of FB & IG, and built a minimalist social network with no feeds, designed to be checked once a week (on Sunday): https://www.sundayy.app/

Feel free to give it a go :)

I remember a twitter mirror with that exact concept - you could only visit user pages, no feed. I cannot find it right now unfortunately. Had a black and red interface?

>I realized that nothing in this social media hellscape was going to help me because even in so-called “safe spaces” I was met with vitriol and hatred in the exact time I needed understanding and comfort.

What a fantastic way to sum up all of my issues with social media. How occasionally, or even most the time you do get support, when people say really f*** up things it's going to affect you. For me the negatives by far outweighed any positives I was gaining from it.

>Dating offline now is as challenging as it was for my dad. That’s how I think of it. But I feel like it’s just the right way to do it. It just rings truer.

At least for me it's actually much easier, I don't waste time swiping on fake profiles or talking the bots. In 2019 I would meet people basically at random, send one or two text messages seeing if they wanted to go out, and that's it. Every courtship indicator I've seen, has dropped tremendously in the age of social media. I recall my first relationship partially failed because I was so afraid of what she'd post on my Facebook, and who would see what she posted. There's no need to introduce this extra stress and bullshit into your life.

I've never been diagnosed with ADHD, but I did find social media and online dating would become addictions for me, it wasn't making me feel happy.

Since I got so much time back from not using social media I was able to teach myself Python in 2019 and significantly increase my income. I went to tons of Meetup groups, found people willing and ready to chat me up, got set up on a date since I attended an alumni event.

I'm very much hoping things get back to somewhat normal this year, I'll also say for certain populations social media can be extra traumatizing. And at that point it comes down to, do you want to be called slurs and re-traumatized every single day. Or do you want to wake up and live. One of my partners I met just because I thought I saw her from someplace else, and we had fantastic fun. It wasn't something where like I felt I was owed a partner, but a gift was given to me. I hope I can always live life like that.

I gave up my smartphone 2 weeks ago, after a year or two of paring down apps and accounts, and experimenting with techniques like leaving my phone in a fixed spot in the kitchen most of the time (including at night).

I finally took the plunge, as I hate the direction that Google is taking the Android ecosystem, and I also realised that allowing Whatsapp so much power over my social life is a terrible mistake. It ties you in - you need a smartphone, typically a Google account, and the benevolence of Facebook, to maintain your "friendships".

I found that, for the first few days after this change, I was incredibly stimulated, and didn't sleep till late. I wasn't overtired, at night or in the morning, and my sleep settled back down, but it was a very interesting effect.

I have two small kids, so not sure how much my sleep is better now, but I can say that this is one of the best decisions I have ever made. My mental acuity and productivity, both at home and at work, has gone through the roof.

What phone do you use now?

Nokia 105. It's what was in my desk drawer.

Exactly. Just delete your personal social media accounts and the apps and save yourself from the noise and you're saving time. It's really that simple and you're really not missing anything on there.

Unless you enjoy waking up with the first thing to do is to check your smartphone with either Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok on speed dial. every. single. day.

I ditched social media and it did make me happier, at least until the pandemic hit. Now I find myself a bit lonelier, since I don't really have many friends to talk about tech with.

Sometimes I contemplate getting on Twitter, but then I'd hear from my friends about the latest ridiculous controversy and abandon that idea. It's all so silly when you take a step back.

I ditched social media years ago, but have been getting my fix through message boards, chatrooms, and emailing people. Depending on your interests, you might have some good luck finding a welcoming community in one of those places. Also, I've found that some people really appreciate being sent a thought-out email since it seems to be rather unexpected these days.

Same here, I ditched traditional social media for other old-fashioned protocols like IRC and even BBS as a hobbie. I'm also part of a few web forums... I really dont feel left.

I'd love to know more!

This year with the pandemic saw me dipping my toes back into social media a little bit, and boy are you correct. I'd use Twitter for a week, see how awful it was AGAIN and then delete the app and go months without touching it. The loneliness of the pandemic does make it easier to justify giving it a try every now and again.

I quit social media last year and started putting my energy into communicating instead of scrolling/browsing. People I care about are happy to text me instead of using whatever platform, and if I want group communication, I use discord. Neither medium is anything more for me than a way to communicate with people I care about, so I don't have to worry about likes, feeds, etc. It's worked out excellently so far

I've been in a Discord room when a student came in and asked us if we could help him with his work about social media by telling him about our usage of Discord. I was a bit surprised that Discord was considered a social media, but other people agreed.

(Is Hacker News social media ?)

> (Is Hacker News social media ?)

It's media that enables you to be social, so I would think so.

This is in comparison to TV, Radio, and Newspapers which are for passive consumption.

It's been years since I had Facebook and Instagram. I stopped whatsapp recently, no longer have Imgur on my phone, etc, etc.

Slowly I'm getting my attention span back, Only recently have I been able to read an article online completely again.

It's bad for you. Truly. It's an addiction and a hard one to get rid of.

I hope we can fix our brains to focus better. I don't through a better routine, I mean something that truly targets the problem at a neurological level.

Article added to my collection on https://www.quitfacebook.org.

Personally, I turned off the news in mid-October and that has improved my quality of life tremendously. I always told myself that since I was listening to NPR it wasn't the same garbage as cable news channels. Nope. Same click bait garbage. Particularly during the Trump era.

My wife has commented that I have been a lot more relaxed and less likely to snap at the kids since the change. I know that I feel more emotionally balanced without it.

HN is social media.

It's not the same. Twitter is designed to constantly pump content and social engagement at you. Once you start scrolling on Twitter, it takes some effort to put it down.

HN is designed to show you 30 "trending" stories at a time, and its refresh rate is pretty slow compared to social media like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. From personal experience, it's pretty easy to load up HN, read a handful of stories/comment threads, and close it. With Twitter, I utilize iOS's built in app blocking features to lock me out of Twitter after 30 minutes. Without that restriction, I have a hard time getting off Twitter on my own.

>> HN is designed to show you 30 "trending" stories at a time, and its refresh rate is pretty slow compared to social media like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit.

Yes - but tweets and Facebook posted each take seconds of your attention whereas a person can spend hours on a HN post, particularly when you leave multiple comments/replies and those receive replies.

Twitter, Facebook, etc. seem a lot more personal to me where it's easy to get wrapped up in the minutia of other peoples' lives. In contrast, HN is a feed of articles with comments on the specific topic and strong moderation to keep it that way. The latter may be "social media" but not like the former.

In a technical sense. It lacks the complexity and dark patterns that define what we commonly referred to as Social Media

HN! I enjoy it but very oftem wate much time reading all those comments!

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